Hi,
A while back, I saw an article in LXF about entitled something like "20 things we'd change about Linux". One of them was to have everything done by command line.

I've just registered a project over at SourceForge - http://sourceforge.net/projects/blizzardsoft BlizzardSoft. With it, I intend to fill the gap of GUI-less commands by creating front-ends for some commands. If you were a new user and really didn't like the command line at all, which commands would you ask for a GUI for?

Do you mean the regular expressions? There are a couple of regular expression editors available, KDE includes one, for testing regexes with a GUI, although I'm usually unconscious from banging my head on the wall before I remember to use one.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." (Albert Einstein)

nelz wrote:Do you mean the regular expressions? There are a couple of regular expression editors available, KDE includes one, for testing regexes with a GUI, although I'm usually unconscious from banging my head on the wall before I remember to use one.

Yes. That is what I mean, but KRegExpEditor seems not to have been carried over to KDE4. Looking in Synaptic on Kubuntu 10.04 (still prefer synaptic) the only similar thing I can see is searchmonkey. I might give it a look.

Probably pretty impossible, but I have dreamed of a dynamic, general-purpose GUI that adapts its display for the selected utility. On selecting a utility, the GUI app would parse the associated man page and create GUI widgets for the various options available. Well, maybe not the man page, but you get the idea. It's not a hard-coded GUI but a dynamic one capable of supporting multiple utilities.
It could also offer simple interactions between supported utilities such as piping.

High on my list come graphical file tinkering utilities such as ps2pdf.
So for example I could take a pile of mixed graphics & photo formats, convert them all to pdf and merge into a single, paginated print file, all with one tool.

Also high on my list, but probably not on many others, comes Adrian Rossiter's Antiprism toolchain for displaying polyhedra.

The ultimate dream is an OS where, by design, the CLI and auto-GUI both hook into the same user service function and so by definition implement the same functionality and are genuine alternatives. Other UI's - audio, tactile, etc. could also hook into the same user service.

"Klinger, do you know how many zoots were killed to make that one suit?" — BJ Hunnicutt, 4077 M*A*S*H